Toward Sustenance
The inaugural Architecting Sustainable Futures convening in 2018 was a catalyzing moment for community-based archives (CBAs). By bringing us into conversation with one another, ASF in 2018 gave us an opportunity to recognize the potential of our collective power.
For SAADA, it was a key moment in our organization’s blossoming as well. In “Against Precarity,” our blog post for ASF in 2018, SAADA co-founder Michelle Caswell and I wrote about the broad base of community support that had sustained SAADA for the previous decade, allowing us to maintain our first full-time staff member. At the time, our budget had grown from just $300 when SAADA was founded in 2008, to an average operating budget of nearly $100,000. But, up to that point, SAADA had received little support from large foundations and government agencies, despite that being our initial assumption about how archives like ours were funded. Instead it was thousands of individual donors, each making gifts of $10, $50, and $100, that gave SAADA the crucial support we needed to build our archive and expand our programming.
By shining a light on our individual and collective impact, and bringing us together on the national stage, ASF in 2018 opened the door to private foundations and government agencies recognizing the value of funding community-based archives directly. Since then, SAADA and other CBAs have received funding from the Mellon Foundation, Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and the National Historical Publications & Records Commission (NHPRC), among others. Due to our continually growing broad base of community support and with additional funding from private foundations and government agencies, SAADA now has a full-time staff of six and annual revenue of nearly $1M. The past five years have been filled with exciting milestones for SAADA: the premiere of our Revolution Remix sound tour of Philadelphia in 2018, the launch of our Archival Creators Fellowship Program in 2019, the publication of Our Stories: An Introduction to South Asian America in 2021, moving into our very first office in 2022 with an office mural featuring our community’s stories, receiving a $1M change capital investment from Mellon, and being named a Philadelphia Cultural Treasure by the Ford Foundation.
Yet, despite our current financial stability and growing success, we continue to recognize the need to develop diverse sustainable long-term revenue strategies — not just for SAADA, but for the field at large.
The report that emerged from ASF in 2018 concluded that “grant funding is not a sustainable business model” for CBAs, due to the fact that grants are often restricted for specific projects and have administrative requirements beyond the capacity of most smaller organizations. Writing, managing, and reporting on grants also requires additional staff labor that is often beyond the capacity of smaller organizations. While partnerships with large, well-funded universities can provide funding and stability, many CBAs find that such arrangements ultimately result in a loss of autonomy and a power imbalance that favors the larger institution. Ultimately, the 2018 ASF report found that in order to be successful, CBAs needed to develop broad-based community support in the form of individual giving along with multiple income streams over time that included partnerships, grants, and earned revenue.
In the non-profit sphere, “contributed revenue” refers to gifts that are made freely without receiving any goods or services in exchange, such as donations or grants. “Earned revenue,” on the other hand, refers to funds generated as a direct exchange for a product or service. In 2020, the Community Archives Collaborative conducted a survey of 28 community-based archives across the U.S., finding that only two of the surveyed CBAs generated a quarter or more of their income from earned revenue. The survey showed that the vast majority of revenue for CBAs comes from grants and donations, with a few CBAs supported by their hosting institutions. Yet in the overall nonprofit sector, 55% of all funding comes from earned revenue, which is more than grants, donations, and government funding combined. This is a striking disparity, prompting the question: if other non-profits are able to diversify their funding between earned revenue, grants, and donations, can CBAs follow suit?
With a IMLS National Leadership grant, SAADA has set out to investigate this question in partnership with three other CBAs: Texas After Violence Project, La Historia Society Museum, and The History Project. Working with researchers Dr. Neville Vakharia (Drexel University) and Dr. Michelle Caswell (UCLA), we are beginning a three-year, cohort-based applied research study to develop and evaluate earned revenue strategies for CBAs and other small to medium-sized libraries, archives, and museums.
Our research questions include the following:
- Which earned revenue generation strategies most effectively build on the strengths of community-based archives?
- How can community-based archives develop and implement earned revenue strategies that ethically use our knowledge assets?
- What, if any, interventions are needed in order for these strategies to be replicable by other small and medium-sized independent libraries, archives, and museums?
Over the next three years, each organization in our cohort will develop and pursue a unique earned revenue strategy that connects to our mission and vision. We will then produce a “how-to” monograph, series of webinars, and web portal with our findings to share our exploration of these earned revenue strategies with the community of CBAs. By investigating paths toward financial sustainability, we hope this study will help address one of the most urgent challenges facing our institutions today. In the upcoming year, some CBAs will have to decide whether they can continue to keep their doors open, maintain their collections, and provide public programs. This should not be happening to organizations that hold some of the most valuable materials documenting the lives of marginalized people at a time when our work is desperately needed — not just in our communities, but in American society writ large. We are optimistic that our research study will generate knowledge that helps CBAs serve our communities more effectively today and for the long term.
